699 crime reports wrongly changed

The Denver Police Department confirmed Thursday that nearly 700 crime reports had been wrongly classified over a two-year period, and those reports were not included in annual crime data reported to state and federal authorities.

The error in reporting was discovered this month during an audit ordered by Denver police Chief Robert White after the department’s data analysts noticed inconsistencies in some numbers. Because of the reporting errors, the department has been unable to produce a 2017 annual crime report for the public, and an internal investigation into who made the changes and why is ongoing.

In total, 1,189 cases were changed to “letter to detective” from a standard crime report in 2016 and 2017, the department said Thursday in a news release. Those cases account for less than 1 percent of crimes in the city.

Of those, 699 were determined to be crimes and should not have been changed to letter to detective, the department said. A letter to detective is an internal report of an incident, but the letter is not considered an official crime report so it is not included in crime data.

Those 699 cases have been reclassified to accurately report that they are crimes. The department’s completed 2017 crime data should be sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation within the next week, the news release said.

The news release did not describe what types of crimes had been mischaracterized or what areas of the city they happened in. Sonny Jackson, a department spokesman, said that information is part of the internal investigation.

Inaccurate or false crime data can damage a department’s credibility, experts say. It’s also a common problem within police departments around the United States, said Mary Dodge, a criminology professor at the University of Colorado Denver.

“Technically, it’s not unusual for departments to fudge their crime statistics a little bit,” Dodge said. “It’s common across the country. No one wants to be the next Chicago or Baltimore.”

Jim Ponzi, an associate professor of criminology at Regis University in Denver who has researched crime reporting and its impact across the United States, said the department is trying to downplay the problem by pointing out that the reports in question represent less than 1 percent of all crimes reported.

“They can say, ‘Yeah, this is 1 percent of all the reports made last year,'” Ponzi said. “But what they’re not saying is they’re not investigating those other reports to make sure nothing is wrong with them. What about those other one million reports? Are they OK?”